Book Image

jQuery UI 1.7: The User Interface Library for jQuery

Book Image

jQuery UI 1.7: The User Interface Library for jQuery

Overview of this book

Modern web application user interface design requires rapid development and proven results. jQuery UI, a trusted suite of official plug-ins for the jQuery JavaScript library, gives you a solid platform on which to build rich and engaging interfaces with maximum compatibility and stability, and minimum time and effort. jQuery UI has a series of ready-made, great-looking user interface widgets and a comprehensive set of core interaction helpers designed to be implemented in a consistent and developer-friendly way. With all this, the amount of code that you need to write personally to take a project from conception to completion is drastically reduced. Specially revised for version 1.7 of jQuery UI, this book has been written to maximize your experience with the library by breaking down each component and walking you through examples that progressively build upon your knowledge, taking you from beginner to advanced usage in a series of easy-to-follow steps. In this book, you'll learn how each component can be initialized in a basic default implementation and then see how easy it is to customize its appearance and configure its behavior to tailor it to the requirements of your application. You'll look at the configuration options and the methods exposed by each component's API to see how these can be used to bring out the best of the library. Events play a key role in any modern web application if it is to meet the expected minimum requirements of interactivity and responsiveness, and each chapter will show you the custom events fired by the component covered and how these events can be intercepted and acted upon.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
jQuery UI 1.7
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Summary


In this chapter we covered resizables. This is a component that allows us to easily resize any onscreen element. It dynamically adds resize handles to the specified sides of the target element and handles all of the tricky DHTML resizing for us, neatly encapsulating the behavior into a compact, easy-to-use class.

We then looked at some of the configurable options we can use with the widget, such as how to specify which handles to add to the resizable, and how the minimum and maximum sizes of the element can be limited.

We briefly looked at how to maintain an image's aspect ratio, or how to work with custom ratios, while it is being resized. We also explored how to use ghosts, helpers, and animations to improve the usability and appearance of the resizable component.

We looked at the event model exposed by the component's API and how we can react to elements being resized in an easy and effective way. Our final example explored resizable's compatibility with another component of the...